ABB are set to invest €100 million in Austrian innovation and training campus

ABB is to invest €100 million in Austria to build a state-of-the-art innovation and training campus at the home of B&R in Eggelsberg, Upper Austria, a year after ABB's acquisition.

The innovation and training campus, which is the largest organic investment in industrial automation in ABB’s more than 130-year history, lays the foundation for around 1000 new high-tech jobs in Austria.

The new innovation and training campus will develop technologies for the factory of the future, in which production will be undertaken autonomously by smart and cloud-connected machines and robots. With this investment, ABB is delivering on its Next Level strategy, which defines innovation as a key driver of profitable growth. The company invests US$1.4 billion in R&D annually, and has a team of around 30 000 R&D and application engineers.

“B&R has had an excellent start within ABB and has exceeded our expectations. We are well on track to achieve our goal of revenues of more than US$1 billion soon,” said ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer. “With our €100 million investment, we are strengthening this dynamic and the pillars of this success story: innovation and people. In addition to the new research and development capacity, our investment will expand B&R’s Automation Academy, offering customers, partners, and employees globally unique education and training programmes.”

ABB acquired B&R, then the largest independent provider of product and software-based open-architecture solutions for machine and factory automation worldwide. Today, B&R is integrated into ABB’s Industrial Automation division as its global Machine & Factory Automation business unit. With the combined portfolios, ABB is today the only industrial automation provider offering customers the entire spectrum of technology and software solutions including measurement, control, actuation, robotics, electrification, and digitalisation.

“This is a great day for B&R,” said Josef Rainer, Co-founder of Bernecker & Rainer Industrie-Elektronik GmbH. “The smooth integration shows that the company Erwin Bernecker and I founded 39 years ago is in excellent hands. I am delighted that ABB continues to write and accelerate our success story with this historic investment.”